How to control the work item key sequence

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi Community!

I'm working on a migration from an external non-Atlassian system to Jira Service Management.

The items will be created in a Jira space called ABC.

ABC is also the name of the project in the source system and items have numbers like ABC_123, ABC_124, ABC_125, ...
The migration will start from item ABC_200000 until ABC_250000.

Ideally the Jira work items keys match the identifiers from the source system.

But this means:

• We need to start at item 200 000 in Jira.
  Is this even possible without creating 200 000 dummy items in Jira and remove them back?
  Can Atlassian Support assist here to control the sequence of work items? On Jira DC I can do it on my own but not on Cloud of course.
  
  
• Users can only start using the new Jira space after the data migration is done
  This was not our initial plan

We are already keeping the original identifiers in an "external issue ID" custom field. But those identifiers are heavily used when communicating. So we really need to make sure identifiers are unique across both systems.
I also thought of using a new space key for the new items only: ABCN for example. This is far from ideal.

Any experience or suggestions are welcome :-)

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Accepted solution]

Hello @Charlie Misonne 

That's theoretically officially documented How to set the starting issue number for a project | Jira and Jira Service Management | Atlassian Support

Just use External System Import via CSV to force Jira's key counter forward.

When you seeding the project, import a single dummy issue with the key ABC-199999 and then delete it. The next native ticket will automatically be ABC-200000. If you're migrating historical data, map your old IDs straight to the "Issue Key" column and Jira will resume counting from the highest imported value.

First please Test it in Sandbox.

Best,

Arek 🤠

[Charlie Misonne]

Hello Arek!

I was pretty sure I tried this before and I got an error 

Unable to create issue: com.atlassian.jira.plugins.importer.compatibility.FixedKeyMutableIssue@

I always assumed this related to the work item key not existing in Jira. But it was some workflow condition throwing this.

I managed to create ABC-200000 now :-)

Thank you so much!

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

No problem!

We are here to help each other.

Have great Day☀️